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I like parties. I always invite most everyone I know, and find it a wonderous thing to get invited to them as well (hint, hint).

Nonetheless, for the first two years of Maya’s existence, I thought a birthday party was unnecessary, given that she wouldn’t really notice one way or the other. But by the ripe old age of three, well, she’d already attended a bunch, and she was quite specific about her desires for a cake in the shape of a bunny. (As luck would have it, my always-helpful Mom happened to have just such a cake mold on hand, left over from some ’70s baking adventures. It’s aluminum, but I let it go, just this once…I did use raspberries to color some of the frosting, which ended up a light pink.)

So this year, a party it was. And for the first time I had to tackle the problem of hosting a gathering that met my newly adopted standards for organic most-everything. In the end, we definitely blew our budget, but it was delightful. I really enjoyed the from-scratch but low-key nature of the gathering. Most importantly, Maya had a wonderful time, and so did the people who delighted us by coming to celebrate.

So here’s a summary of lessons learned, tips and links for hosting your own greener gathering!

Top Ten Tips for Hosting a Greener Kid’s Birthday Party

Given the higher cost of hosting with organic and nicer foods, I’ll start with a few ways to keep the budget lower on other items:

1) Pick an affordable spot to have it, which may require some searching. We would have hosted it at home, but felt compelled to invite too many people for our wee abode. So we comparison priced local spots at parks. While County parks where we live wanted $100 for a picnic area, the National Rock Creek Park was $8 for a grove. Hosting it in a spot where we didn’t pay per-child also was a relief when extra kids wanted to come, and we could accommodate anyone we needed to.

2) Use seasonal decorations that you can eat or enjoy later. We ditched the plastic decor and kid themes and put squashes, pumpkins, and pomegranates on the table instead, along with a fall-colored orchid. We stuck dried colorful leaves and acorns in a pumpkin vase, and brought out serving plates we use for the holidays, which fit the autumnal theme perfectly. We’ll carve the pumpkins, cook the squash into soup, and enjoy the plants over the next weeks and months.

3) Find some of what you need for entertaining at the thrift store. I hit a local thrift store’s Labor Day sale and found great items for cheaper than you would pay for disposable tableware, including a punch bowl with 14 cups for $5 and a large serving platter for $7. For a tea party theme, mismatched plates from delicate sets work great, and if you pick up these kinds of things, they can be used year after year, or even for playtime with little concern given their affordability.

4) Keep the menu simple, and make it from scratch. For an early afternoon event, I made only four things: mostly-organic hummus, some homemade pickles, guacamole, lemonade and cake. For the rest, I put out fresh fruits and vegetables, sliced or chopped as needed, a few chips and nuts, crackers, olives and cheese. It was plenty! Simple menus allow you to shop for nicer ingredients, and to put care into what you prepare. The biggest hits were the lemonade mixed on-site from organic sugar, water and fresh-squeezed lemon juice. In keeping with the DIY theme, for future parties, I would consider letting the kids decorate their own cupcakes with icing tips on (PVC-free) plastic baggies of frosting, or having guests mash up their own guacamole from a table with all the prepped ingredients and a molcajete.

5) Use toys you already own for amusements. Last year, I scored a bunch of costumes and dress-ups at a yard sale for a only a few bucks, and they made the perfect side activity in a corner of the grove. The kids enjoyed messing around with those and a box of puppets I’ve collected from thrift stores and yard sales.

6) Make the crafts part of the favors, and let the kids decorate the favor bags. We used simple brown lunch bags for decorating at the craft table, along with wooden eggs and doo-dads I ordered directly from a great low-cost supplier in the woods of Maine. The kids had a ball painting the eggs, gluing feathers to them, and building items out of the wood. Their creativity was amazing!

7) Pick simple games from your own childhood. There are a ton of simple games, depending on the ages involved — like boiled or raw eggs on a spoon races, gunnysack races, three-legged races, musical stepping stones, water balloon toss or horseshoes and bean bag toss. You can use craft store felt squares to mark out spaces on the grass if needed, and then keep them for felt crafts like these. Some games, like Mother May I, Red Light, Green Light, Duck, Duck Goose and Simon Says require no props at all. If you want to take it up a notch, Green Planet Parties has a number of lovely game options and birthday favors that can work well, especially for smaller parties. (Just allow plenty of time for it clear customs if in the U.S., as the mostly handmade goodies ship from Canada.)

8) Having a “no gifts” rule is a nice touch, if your kid can cope. It’s kinder to other parents and also ensures you won’t be dealing with unwanted items that aren’t as green as the things you prefer for your home.

9) Keep it on the small side — or at least, don’t sweat the small stuff. File this one under “do as I say” but of course the recommended size for children’s parties is modest, and many folks follow a rule to invite the number of children that corresponds to the age of the child. This reduces costs, as well as the number of pricey biodegradable or green tableware items you might have to buy.

We’ll aim for this in future years, as this year’s was a bit ridonculous (though great fun). I did manage to shrug it off when the much-coveted bunny cake actually was dropped into the dirt and obliterated en route to the picnic table. This helped Maya move on as well. It appeared to make some sense to her when I said the bunny had returned to the woods from which it came. It’s always nice when a child’s capacity for magical thinking can help save the day…

10) Pick up the right stuff for entertaining that you can use again and again. In keeping with the greener kitchen list I posted earlier, here are some (un-commissioned) links to greener items for entertaining I found:

Anchor Hocking Glass beverage server: This was lovely and well-priced for the lemonade, and it is mostly glass besides the small plastic spout, unlike some which come with “metal” lids. I worried about lead in the “crystal” versions, which were more pricey anyway.

On the cake, which is always the most fun thing to think about, if you are as timid a baker as I am, you can’t go wrong with any of the dozens of wonderful cake recipes from Smitten Kitchen. That is, you can’t unless you ignore Deb’s careful and detailed instructions as I once did to my profound sorrow. I’ve made her scrumptious apple cake before, and for the birthday I loved the vanilla-buttermilk cake from her new cookbook.

Ms. Smitten is far more meticulous about stacking layers and the like (mine happened to both be lop-sided in ways that perfectly mirrored each other, so it turned out alright), but she does have sound advice on this score if you need it. If you run out of time to decorate more inventively, as I did, I also recommend having some nice-ish fresh fruit on hand, as a few thinly sliced kiwis and some berries are a great cheat and dress up a cake with little fuss.

For gluten-free cake, I did use a mix, and found that Pamela’s Chocolate Cake Mix (which I found at Whole Foods) worked well when I substituted coconut oil (using a little less than called for) for vegetable oil. The cake was very moist and slightly coconut-y, which was appealing with the chocolate.

A few notes on things you may want to avoid:

1) Most bouncy huts and the like are made of PVC, a poison plastic, and some are even likely contaminated with lead. There’s no need to put kids inside these for any real length of time, particularly indoors. Balloons are also PVC, as are many “party store” decorations like banners, etc., so keeping these outdoors is a good idea to the extent you may want to use them. The mani-pedi party one 5-year-old girl I know got invited to is also just a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons.

2) In a 2009 study, 100 percent of the face paints tested came up positive for lead, a potent neurotoxin that is now thought to be harmful in much smaller amounts. We use Giotto Face Pencils, which the company claims are lead-free, but they are no longer available from any vendor I’ve found in the U.S. (you can get it shipped through ebay from Europe). MightyNest also sells Glob, another lead-free brand, but it contains phenoxyethanol, which gets a 4 on Skin Deep, as a preservative.

Most of all, do try to enjoy it as much as you possibly can! This time is so fleeting, really, and nothing marks time for all of us like a birthday!

If you have tips from your party hosting (or party-going) experiences, please share!

Toys, it must be said, can be as annoying as they are delightful. Toddler toys have gazillions of pieces, some of which are required for the set-up to work. Puzzle pieces and the like inevitably end up in the sofa cushions, the car seat, even the refrigerator, making it part of the puzzle just to keep the darn thing together!

So I’ll have to give credit to the inventiveness of Maya’s former preschool in showing me that excellent toys need not be, well, toys. They used tennis balls with mouths cut into them and eyes drawn on for holding buttons, lovely little thrift store change purses with zippers, snaps and clamps for practicing fine motor skills, and even several sizes of old sets of hair curlers with the bristles for building blocks. And of course, there is the always popular cardboard box, which can be a fort, hiding place, or other retreat.

Then there are natural un-toys, like acorns, dried leaves in fall, stones, pine cones, shells and other wonders. These can be displayed on a nature table seasonally with small dolls or building structures if you have the space and patience with all the bits that will inevitably end up on the floor.

Sadly, thrift store toy aisles are rather depressing, plastic-filled places. So get out of there and into the tchotchke aisle instead. Here are some things to look for while at thrift stores, on-line on places like Ebay, or at yard or estate sales:

Old fantasy chess sets or other interesting game pieces, the more elaborate the better;

Sets of interesting similar items, like the three bags of miniature painted duck decoys I found for a buck each;

Small wooden figures;

Small furniture that can serve for dolls;

Glass baubles and stones for a light table (easily made with an upended plastic storage box and flashlight or light stick);

Small figures for the sandbox or a shadow box;

Craft supplies (I found a large bag of simple wooden blocks that Maya has had a ball painting; also birdhouses for painting and raffia for use in 3-D constructions);

Dress-up clothes and small purses;

Large pieces of nicer fabric and scarves to use as forts, dress-ups, etc.

Stamps and batik blocks, rolling pins or cookie cutters for tracing and playdough;

Muffin tins, measuring cups, wooden bowls and nesting bowls;

Baskets to keep all the toys (and un-toys) organized and accessible.

Here’s some of our current items in circulation, including these cool stamps:

There’s nothing I enjoy more than inventing a new purpose for some castaway that gives it renewed life. What are some things you’ve scored along the way?

Why do I care about thrifting? All this organic, sustainably raised, solid wood nonsense I love comes with a hefty pricetag, and you have to save money somewhere. So Maya rarely has new clothes on her small body, unless a Grandma gave them to her. Instead, she ruins a buck-fitty jumper most days of the week, which is A-ok with me. (And there are good environmental sustainability reasons not to buy new clothes, as a great piece by Tom Philpott, Are Your Skinny Jeans Starving the World?, made clear last week.) I love the idea of re-use, and children’s clothing, toys and books, with its expiration date of tomorrow, are perfect places to recycle.

And I’ll confess here and now to being a competitive yard saler. There’s many a Saturday morn I’m dashing about my suburban hood to beat other competi-moms to the few wooden toys out there, somewhere. There’s not much I like better these days than a really gorgeous toy for a dollar. Which is pretty sad, I know. I’m sorry to saddle you with that information, really. (You can forget it now, and enjoy your Saturdays over coffee and the paper while I’m out chasing the dream.)

I also love it when I come across a small, do-able craft project at a thrift store or yard sale — an item that begs me to take it home and craft it up a bit. Such was the moment when I first laid eyes on this plain, kinda’ fugly wooden house at my local Value Village for a cool ten dollars.

I just knew that its destiny was to be a much nicer establishment, in the marginally better neighborhood of my house. I had some old paint (Mythic, zero-VOC) hanging around from the samples I used for Maya’s room, and figured that a little sandpaper, a judicious amount of love and a generous helping of brown paint to cover the scarred rooftops would be enough to make it spring to life as a flipped home.

In addition to the $10 on the house itself, I spent likely $15 on paint and supplies.

The brushes and sandpaper, as well as most of the paint, can also be used on future projects. For painting the brown roof, I also used Mythic paint, which I recommend and like, though it only comes in a matte finish.

Since the wood had nice markings on the sides and vertical surfaces, but was lousy on the roof and floors, that was my guide.

The first step was to use the rough sandpaper to even out the rooftop and smooth the edges on the roof to a more pleasing shape. This actually didn’t take long at all.

Next, I mopped it down to get the dust and dirt off with an old cloth diaper (because it was lint-free-ish). And taped up the windows, because I envisioned them in the light blue we had left over from when we decided to use a different blue in Maya’s bedroom.

Maya did her own watercolor painting while all this was ongoing.

After gingerly dabbing on blue on the window panes with the smallest brush, inside and out, I hit the two floors of the house with an off-white, also left-over from a project. They needed two coats to be convincing, but it eventually worked.

Last, I painted the roof brown, which also benefited from a second coat the next day.

When all the paint had dried, I used the fine sandpaper to clean up the painted areas, then rubbed organic flaxseed oil with a cloth into the remaining unpainted wood. The oil created a nice color that showed off the variations in the wood.

I let the oil and paint dry for the week we were at the beach, and there was little odor from either, really, even from the start.

Basically, Martha Stewart has nothin’ on me. Seriously, I recommend this kind of tinkering. It was a terrific, small and fun project. Maya points to the brown roof and says, “painting,” so its clear that she knows it was hand-finished for her. And now she has a cheap new dollhouse, finished with a little care, that even matches the tones in her bedroom.

These days, her bunnies mostly live in it, with their faces squished awkwardly out through the upstairs windows, but I have high hopes that others might move in someday.

Laura & Maya

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I'm a mom, consumer advocate and self-proclaimed nerd for news on health, safety, green living, food and politics. What happens when a public interest lawyer finally has her own child to think about? Follow me, and find out.

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